GMG - Las Vegas Weekly

October 3, 2013

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A&E | SCREEN
> THEY'RE ON A BOAT Affleck and
Timberlake brood in luxury.
FILM
SMALL-SCALE
HISTORY
Parkland looks at the bit
players in the JFK assassination
FILM
RUN DOWN
Runner Runner is a sluggish poker thriller BY MIKE D'ANGELO
and David Levien, the team responsible for Rounders;
In Texas Hold 'em, a player who makes an improbthey know their stuff, so they're well aware that the
able winning hand using the last two board cards dealt
actual criminal activity engaged in by sites like Full
is said to have gone "runner runner." It's an unfortuTilt Poker was far too mundane to fuel a popcorn
nately ironic title for this tepid gambling-world thriller,
movie like this one. (Writing yourself a check using
which collapses further in the home stretch rather than
funds deposited by players isn't terribly
beating the (considerable) odds to triumph.
cinematic.) Unfortunately, they've raised
Early on, the ﬁlm makes a valiant but
the stakes using an utterly generic temfutile attempt to derive excitement from
aabcc
plate—when, for example, Gemma Arterton
online poker, as Princeton grad student and
RUNNER RUNNER
is introduced as Block's woman ("girlmathematical prodigy Richie Furst (Justin Justin Timberlake,
friend" would falsely suggest that she's not
Timberlake) loses all of his tuition money
Ben Affleck, Gemma
a possession), she might as well come out
over the course of one session, in a way so Arterton. Directed
and say, "Nice to meet you, Richie; I look
statistically improbable that it all but guarby Brad Furman.
forward to our inevitable dangerous liaiantees he's been swindled. As any broke colRated R. Opens
son." Having no real suspense to work with,
lege kid surely would, Richie ﬂies to Costa
Friday.
director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer)
Rica to confront the site's CEO, Ivan Block
ﬁlls the screen with conspicuous consump(Ben Afﬂeck), only to have the impressed
tion—huge yachts, lavish houses, wild parties—as if the
suit offer him a wildly lucrative job. If the pet crocodiles
mere sight of wealth, combined with manic camera
Block keeps in his backyard aren't an indication that all
moves, will get pulses racing. And the last two cards
isn't well in this tropical paradise, however, the pesky
don't help: When Richie ﬁnally turns the tables on
FBI agent (Anthony Mackie) insisting that Richie dig up
Block, it's via a scheme so tediously complicated that
some dirt on his employer certainly is.
it belongs in an Excel spreadsheet.
Runner Runner was written by Brian Koppelman
Adapted from Vincent Bugliosi's Four
Days in November (which was itself merely
the preliminary section of a 1,600-page
investigative work, Reclaiming History),
Parkland depicts the events of the John F.
Kennedy assassination as seen through
the eyes of numerous people tangentially
connected to it, from the doctors and nurses
who treated Kennedy (and later Lee Harvey
Oswald) at Dallas' Parkland Hospital to
Abraham Zapruder
(Paul Giamatti), the
man operating the
aaacc
camera that captured
PARKLAND
the most famous
Zac Efron, Paul
home-movie footage
Giamatti, James
in history.
Badge Dale,
Though efforts are
Colin Hanks.
Directed by Peter made to tug at the
heartstrings—mostly
Landesman.
by including the beRated PG-13.
wildered, heartbroken
Opens Friday.
reaction of Oswald's
older brother, Robert
(James Badge Dale)—the film is mostly just
a meticulous, streamlined reconstruction
of the events of November 22-25, 1963, in
Dallas, featuring exactly the amount of
fascination and frustration that approach
would suggest.
Oddly enough, Parkland whiffs most of
the really big moments, like the assassination itself, but excels at depicting details that
would never occur to you: the difficulty of
finding a developer that could handle Zapruder's film on short notice, for example, or
the efforts of grieving Secret Service agents
to fit JFK's coffin through the slim door of Air
Force One. Woodrow Wilson allegedly called
The Birth of a Nation "history written with
lightning"; here, it's written with a batterypowered flashlight. –Mike D'Angelo
FILM
Afghanistan's official submission for
this year's Best Foreign Language Film
Oscar (although it wasn't nominated),
The Patience Stone is a sometimes overly blunt fable about the plight of women in the wartorn Middle East. Its unnamed heroine (Golshifteh Farahani) keeps watch over her husband
(Hamidreza Javdan), who lies in some sort of vegetative state with a bullet wound in his neck (his
condition seems more allegorical than medical). As explosions and gunfire surround them, she
unburdens herself to her husband, an abusive and neglectful man who now has no choice but to
listen. Farahani carries the movie almost single-handedly, and her performance is remarkable.
Even as the narrative sometimes becomes didactic, or when it takes a troubling turn toward
the end, Farahani continues to be mesmerizing, raw and vulnerable. It's an honest and very real
performance at the heart of a movie that can be a little abstract. –Josh Bell
PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE
aaacc
THE PATIENCE
STONE
Golshifteh
Farahani,
Hamidreza Javdan,
Hassina Burgan.
Directed by Atiq
Rahimi. Rated R.
Opens Friday.
OCTOBER 3–9, 2013 LASVEGASWEEKLY.COM
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